


and it can all come undone with a slip of the tongue

by Anonymous



Category: The Wilds (TV 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Gen, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Underage Drug Use, avert your fragile virgin eyes kids, bye minor, not safe for minotaurs, shark attack? what shark attack?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-17 04:22:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29465712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: It was only 30 days into the experiment and the girls had exceeded each and every expectation Gretchen ever had for them, it almost pained her to have to throw yet another spanner into the works with the help of her undercover operative and the power of persuasion.
Relationships: Shelby Goodkind/Toni Shalifoe
Comments: 12
Kudos: 49
Collections: Anonymous





	and it can all come undone with a slip of the tongue

It was Day 30 of the Dawn of Eve experiment and everything was working out just as Gretchen had hoped, they had exceeded all her expectations; the girls had overcome practically all their individual traumas and were working harmoniously as a group to survive on the island, they were well ahead of schedule. It pained her to have to do this but her audience had made their incredibly irrational demands clear.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Nora, her confederate, protested over the sat phone. Of course she would balk at this, she was only ever supposed to observe and report not sow chaos amongst the group. Gretchen’s dearly departed Linh would’ve had no such qualms.

“Nora, this is just a test and I have every confidence you girls will work together to overcome this little issue in a rational, mature way,” Gretchen assured her. “Just make sure you use the buzzwords we’ve provided to trigger the right responses and nudge the conversation in the right direction.”

Nora worried her bottom lip between her teeth, this was not what she signed up for but she too had faith that the girls bonds were now far too strong to be ripped apart but such a manipulation. They’d already been through so much together, surely there was no way a few gentle nudges from her could cause them to descend into a mob mentality, right?

“Okay,” she agreed, guilt already bubbling up in the pit of her stomach. “I’ll do it. What do you want me to say again?”

-

Strolling hand in hand back along the beach with Shelby, Toni couldn’t help but feel an enormous rush of pride towards her Texan girlfriend. It had only been a week but Shelby had come such a long way in terms of openly displaying affection in front of the others.

She wasn’t sure how much the fact that they’d all pretty much resigned themselves into believing that they were never going to be rescued and forced to return to face the lives they’d left behind played into that but for now she wasn’t going to let it bring her down.

Toni was so caught up in her musing that it was Shelby who was the first to pick up on the weirdly tense atmosphere permeating the camp and Toni only noticed when she felt Shelby stiffen beside her.

“Good, you’re back.” Dot rose to greet them while the others all looked away uncomfortably.

“Dottie?” Shelby shifted nervously. “What’s goin’ on?”

“Sit down you two, we need to have a talk.” Dot gestured to a piece of driftwood that had been set aside just for them.

“Uh, so what is this, an intervention?” Toni had been through enough of them with her mom to know what an intervention looked like.

“No,” Dot said while Rachel said “Yes.” at the exact same time.

“We just have some concerns we need to talk to you about,” Dot continued, shooting a glare at Rachel.

“For the record, I’d like to be excluded from this-” Fatin waved her hands at the assembled group of girls. “whole batshit crazy narrative you guys have cooked up this evening.”

She got up, snatching the half empty bottle of vodka from their supply store and grumpily planted herself firmly in the sand away from the rest of the group closer to where Shelby and Toni were sitting, making her objection to what was about to go down abundantly clear.

“You have concerns?” Shelby asked nervously as she and Toni sat down on the log. “About us?”

Everyone nodded, except Fatin -who just shook her head, unscrewed the bottle of vodka and took a swig- and Leah, who was curled up in a ball and was obsessively picking at her eyebrow, not seeming like she was at all there.

“You guys are being inappropriate,” Dot finally blurted out since it seemed like she was the only one with the balls enough to say what they’d all agreed upon only minutes before.

“Excuse me? Wasn’t it only a few weeks ago y’all were icing me out for bein’ homophobic and now-”

“This isn’t about you guys being gay!” Dot protested. “It’s about the fact that you’re minors and we’re minors and you having sex is making some of us really uncomfortable.”

“I-what?” Shelby manages to stutter while next to her Toni could only stare in confused bewilderment, trying to figure out what had brought this on when only this morning several members of their little group had expressed their approval of their relationship.

“A whole ass clown car,” Fatin observed quietly, taking another sip of the vodka.

For her part, Nora couldn’t quite believe how easy it had been to sway the group’s opinion with Fatin being the only hold out. Gretchen sure knew what she was doing with those trigger words.

“Like what you guys do in private is your business,” Rachel spoke up. “But we shouldn’t have to be exposed to it.”

“Exposed to it?” Toni finally spoke up. “Nobody’s seen anything!”

“I did,” claimed Nora. “The other day by the waterfall, I had to watch you guys.”

Shelby placed a calming hand on Toni’s bouncing leg. “Okay, first of all, we had no idea you were there-”

Rachel shook her head. “No excuse.”

“Secondly, what do you mean you _had_ to watch us, why didn’t you just leave?”

“I mean, it’s not really my responsibility to remove myself from a situation where I feel uncomfortable,” Nora said, drawing her long sleeves up over her hands. “You guys never should have put me in that position in the first place.”

“And then there’s the other night,” Dot added. “We could hear you up in the dunes, it wasn’t fair of you guys to expose us to that.”

“Okay, sorry but we were drunk, I mean we all were,” Shelby apologized. “We weren’t thinkin’ clearly.”

“And that’s the other thing-”

-

“Why are we doing this again?” Alex questioned, watching the girls on screen continue to turn on each other.

Gretchen sighed and turned to him. “Because we’ve had complaints from some of our backers, a whole fifty seven of them have claimed that viewing this kind of content makes their underage children feel uncomfortable,” she explained in a patronizing tone. Poor Alex, he tries so hard but he was just too smooth brained to understand her galaxy brained genius. “And we must prioritize their feelings above all else.”

“If it makes them so uncomfortable, why don’t they just stop watching?” Alex shook his head in disgust. This whole thing was so fucked up. “And we have no proof that it’s actually fifty seven individuals, the complaints were anonymous and Agent Young said the writing style of most of them is so similar it’s probably just one or two people trying to stir up trouble and interfere with the experiment.”

“Ok, that sounds like a lie but even if it was, should we make even just one of our founders’ poor kids feel safer by doing this, then it’s all worth it,” Gretchen stated, turning her back on Alex and common sense. She pressed her hand to her chest, the glow of moral superiority warming her from the inside -she was doing God herself’s work- it was almost better than an orgasm. “For the children.”

“For the children,” Audrey and Thom chanted in agreement, simping harder than ever for Gretchen.

“I mean, should children even be watching this?” Susan asked, her own ethical crisis kicking in. “Exactly how young are we talking here?”

“Shhh, we’re getting to the really good part.”

-

“What’s your point?” Toni could feel the urge to punch something rising the longer this went on. Now they had an issue with what she and Shelby had done while they were both drunk.

“The point is that Shelby had been drinking and she’s underage and couldn’t have possibly given you proper consent,” Nora droned, making sure to hammer home the talking points that Gretchen had texted to her.

“I had been drinking too,” Toni protested. “And she literally shoved my face right into her vagina, how much more consent do I need?”

Martha shrieked in mental distress, pulling her froggie hood tight across her head. It was too much for her fragile psyche to bear.

“Verbal and also a written form, signed and dated in front of a legal witness, obviously,” Fatin said sarcastically, rolling her eyes.

“None of us can consent to anything!” Leah suddenly yelled, eyes wild and crazy. She stood, throwing her arms out wide; the dam wall that was holding back all of the paranoia she’d been repressing over the past week finally breaking. “It’s like we’re just fictional characters with no control of our own! They make us act out scenes for their sick entertainment, we’re like puppets on strings!”

She started spinning in a circle, looking up at the sky. “Is this what you want?” she screamed up at the stars in her hoarse voice. “You want us to dance for you, huh? You want us to fuck for you?”

“Jesus,” Dot said, gesturing at Leah who was spinning across the sand continuing to scream at the sky. “Now look what you’ve done, you broke Leah.”

“How is that my fault?” Toni looked to her girlfriend, who had started moving away from her and inching back to the rest of the group. 

Sure, Shelby had enjoyed it at the time, was a more than willing participant, and certainly hadn’t felt like a victim but if so many other people were saying that she had been taken advantage of then maybe it was true.

“Look we’re teenagers, we do dumb teenage shit-”

“Actually,” Martha spoke up for the first time. “Your birthday was last week Toni, you’re eighteen now, an adult, so I mean you and Shelby, it really isn’t appropriate for you guys to be together anymore, is it.”

“Marty-”

“It’s not just inappropriate,” Rachel chimed in. “It’s statutory rape is what it is.”

Toni’s jaw dropped. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”

“You can’t stay with us anymore, Toni!” Dot declared, stepping protectively in front of Shelby and slamming the pointed end of her stick into the ground to emphasize her point. “You are an adult now and we are impressionable young children. You’re making us feel too unsafe with your predatory ways and you’re banished from the group!”

“What the fucking flying fuck is this bullshit?”

“Language!” Rachel snapped, covering Martha’s sensitive virgin ears with her hands. “There are minors present!”

“Uh, I’m with Toni,” Fatin interjected. “This shit is completely insane.”

“You have to go too, Fatin. You’re clearly a bad influence on us with your hedonistic ways and constant inappropriate sexual innuendos,” Nora spoke up, not meaning a word that was coming out of her mouth but the others seemed to eat it up.

“Yeah, you keep talking about dicks and it’s triggering me,” Rachel, who had recently come out as asexual, said. Martha nodded vigorously and Shelby hummed in agreement.

“Fine!” Fatin shouted back, clutching the vodka bottle to her chest as she stomped over to the pile of supplies and filled her arms with assorted supplies. “But we’re taking the rest of the weed gummies and all the alcohol!”

“Good!” Dot yelled back. “We’re just innocent kids, we shouldn’t have access to them anyway!”

As Fatin started walking away, muttering under her breath about finally being able to get off that fucking beach and finding some actually decent shelter, Toni looked pleadingly at Shelby, begging her to come to her defence or at least leave the group with her. “Shelby-”

“Sorry, Toni, but they’re right. It’s not fair to us minors to have you around, it’s best if you just go” were the words that came out of Shelby’s mouth. But she tried her best to communicate to Toni with her eyes that she was only publicly siding with the hivemind to avoid being shunned yet again and would definitely be meeting up with her in secret because there was no way in hell she was giving up her orgasms that she enjoyed so much.

Toni hung her head, feeling the sting of rejection but surprisingly the all too familiar feeling of anger failed to rise up in her as it had so often in the past. Mostly because the whole situation was just so ridiculous that she hadn’t fully processed it yet. 

She looked up in time to see Shelby mouthing the words “Lychee tree later?” at her, she nodded in acknowledgement then threw up her middle fingers at the rest of the group, flipping them off as she started walking away backwards. “So you all can go and get fucked, obviously you need it.”

The remaining girls -minus Leah who was still spinning in circles along the beach, her voice now worn out from her screaming- watched until Toni and Fatin’s forms had disappeared into the trees and then sat back down around the fire in silence, all of them at a loss of how to proceed now that they’d just ostracised two members of their group over an issue that had seemingly sprung up out of nowhere.

“So...how about an ice-breaker?”

**Author's Note:**

> Literally haven't written any fanfic in years but I've just been inspired recently idk why.


End file.
